MudMan
@MudMan@fedia.io
- Comment on The State of Switch Emulation right now is objectively hilarious 1 day ago:
Eden/Azahar seem to be the current meta replacement for the newer Nintendo platforms. I wonder how much of that is a crowdfunded assessment of quality and how much is a result of modern emu communities being driven by preinstalled bundles in launchers, handhelds and install scripts (think ES-DE standards or Retrodeck/Emudeck defaults).
Either way, hey, they work fine, so... yay?
- Comment on OLAY! 2 weeks ago:
I did not remember that and I still remember "Los pollos hermanos", so that tells you how weird that one is.
Also, this dogpile works better if you understand what you're reading. The comedic effect bit was about the title of the thread, not about my own typo. Now you made it weird by trying to outpedant a pedant but not having the reading comprehension to pedant properly.
- Comment on OLAY! 2 weeks ago:
Goddamn it.
NOW it's fixed.
- Comment on OLAY! 2 weeks ago:
I mean... no, mine's a typo (fixed now, thanks for the poke), the other one is a deliberate spelling for comedic effect that accidentally uncovers an endless loop of abject multilingual terror.
This is a Gus Frink meme type of situation.
He also, incidentally, couldn't speak Spanish for shit. That whole show was a nightmare. "Los Pollos Hermanos" as a phrase haunts me. I genuinely, not joking about this, sometimes find myself thinking about it at random times after all this time.
- Comment on OLAY! 2 weeks ago:
You'd be surprised. Spanish countries often dub movies, particularly back then.
But if you want to know what it felt like later in life I can help.
- Comment on OLAY! 2 weeks ago:
...
The ouroboros of bad pronutiation the headline implies is throwing me for a massive loop.
I mean, you carry on with your American politics things, I just saw this on my feed and had an existential crisis.
- Comment on soda 3 weeks ago:
I mean, I appreciate the gumption but, honestly? This mentality is probably why Americans can't have decent public services.
- Comment on Silent Hill f, now on GOG 3 weeks ago:
I mean, convenience is a factor.
And while Steam doesn't typically sign exclusive stuff they are known to use store positioning as a bargaining chip for preferential treatment. You'd think Konami would be above needing that, but who knows.
Anyway, good game, whatever the reason for the delay. Someone who is on the fence about getting it on Steam go get it on GOG instead to make up for them tricking me.
- Comment on Silent Hill f, now on GOG 3 weeks ago:
It's come and gone a couple times. There was a period where a bunch of big games did simultaneous launches, then a big period of drought where a few large publishers withdrew entirely from new releases and recently a few isolated AA and AAA releases started popping back up. I wonder if it's driven by how much effort they can put into outreach or something like that.
- Comment on Silent Hill f, now on GOG 3 weeks ago:
Yeah, it sucks for Silent Hill especially because a) it's super expensive, at 80 bucks on PC, and b) I was on the fence about getting it at launch and only jumped in a few days ago. I'm just out of the refund window and... hey, I like it so far, but I don't like it 160 bucks' worth.
Whoever is screwing with GOG screwed them out of my purchase and I'm starting to think that not buying anything on Steam at all if I can help it may be the way to go.
- Comment on Do boycotts work? 3 weeks ago:
Boycotts, yes.
"I was on the fence about buying this and I want to sound engaged on the Internet, may still get it later" voting-with-your-wallet nonsense? No.
- Comment on Silent Hill f, now on GOG 3 weeks ago:
Alright, this is great, but also people need to start confirming GOG drops before the Steam launch. I check for GOG launches whenever I buy a game, but just this month there's been a couple of big games that got stealth GOG launches just after their Steam release and it's been extremely frustrating. I don't know if it's a publisher thing to work around pirates waiting for DRM free versions or Steam being dicks about it, but it's infuriating.
- Comment on I finally decided to go full piracy against big companies 3 weeks ago:
It's a "me" problem in that "I" think the indies vs AAA lines are increasingly inconsistent and nonsensical. "I" also find the concept of "pirating against" to be extremely disingenuous, which is why there is a whole post explaining that after the line you quoted.
- Comment on I finally decided to go full piracy against big companies 3 weeks ago:
The hell does "piracy against big companies" even mean?
Man, pirate what you can't afford if you must, just... you know, be honest about it. I'm always annoyed by people doing the thing they wanted to do anyway and presenting it as activism. That's not how that works.
For the record, while I think there's plenty to be critical about in modern gaming, "DLC", "game has a launcher" and "game is ported from other platforms" are not that. "A game I played on the PS3 was too expensive when I wanted to rebuy it" is somebody giving you bad value up front, not some ideological stance you're taking. For the record, I also didn't buy it because I also didn't think their launch price was right. In fairness, it has since been on sale for 30 bucks multiple times, which is a lot more reasonable.
And again, I'm not saying don't pirate it. Do what you want. Just don't be weird about it.
- Comment on Do you think The Boys is an accurate representation if real people had superpowers? 3 weeks ago:
No, no, Jeff Ennis worked as an actual superhero briefly in the 1970s you're thinking of John Ennis, who created The Boys as a musical in the 90s, but he was mad about his working conditions.
- Comment on Do you think The Boys is an accurate representation if real people had superpowers? 3 weeks ago:
No, it's much more interesting than that.
It's an accurate representation of Garth Ennis being mad about having to work with superheroes despite not liking that at all and being a bit of a petty bitch with a bit of a dudebro sense of humor that, frankly, we all overrated at the time because when you were a teenager in the 90s you thought Preacher was hilarious and it got to his head a bit.
And then it's an accurate representation of Eric Kripke who was very much the right age to have gone through that, taking the material and going "well, that Trump guy sure was a thing, huh?" and "aren't you kind of over all those MCU movies, also?" because superheroes in film were at the same point in 2019 than they were on comic books in 2006.
Don't be the teenager we all were in the 90s and assume that "edgy and mean and over the top" is the same as "smart and realistic". It's not.
I'll say that the show is at least less callous than the original material and it's at least trying to be political, which makes it slightly more plausible and internally consistent than Ennis' HR complaint of a comic book. Hollywood has a history of taking this edgelord crap (see also: every single Mark Millar adaptation) and making it palatable by applying the same mainstreaming and dumbing down that kills every Alan Moore adaptation. Turns out if the original material isn't that smart to begin with that's actually a good thing to do.
- Comment on I'm gonna die on this hill or die trying 3 weeks ago:
Well that went places.
- Comment on I'm gonna die on this hill or die trying 3 weeks ago:
This is a weird pattern in that presumably mass abandonment of the em dashes due to the memes around it looking like AI content would quickly lead to newer LLMs based on newer data sets also abandoning em dashes when it tries to seem modern and hip and just punt the ball down the road to the next set of AI markers. I assume as long as book and press editors keep stikcing to their guns that would go pretty slow, but it'd eventually get there. And that's assuming AI companies don't add instructions about this to their system prompts at any point. It's just going to be an endless arms race.
Which is expected. I'm on record very early on saying that "not looking like AI art" was going to be a quality marker for art and the metagame will be to keep chasing that moving target around for the foreseeable future and I'm here to brag about it.
- Comment on Amid EA's unpopular $55 billion buyout, Baldur's Gate 3 director takes time "to remind people that making games faster and cheaper while charging more has never worked before" 3 weeks ago:
I mean, all due respect, to the guy, but this doesn't go down until 2027. At least give them a minute to get in the position where they could feasibly fuck up before you berate them for it.
If you look at the Internet they are apparently definitely dismantling the company to sell the pieces but also definitely continuing to make what they make but with MAGA politics but also as a muslim theocracy and trimming down and speeding up but also doubling down on live service at the same time somehow.
And man, one or multiple of those may happen, but almost certainly not all of them and none have happened yet. Given how much of a public-ass public company chasing short term gains they've been historically I can't help but think there's a fair amount of projection going on.
Here's my stance: I have no idea what this means and I have no idea what they're going to do. This is all weird and I have zero frame of reference for how the new owners are going to gel with that organization or what their new objectives are going to be when compared to the old "make more money this quarter than last quarter" thing.
- Comment on Do you recognize this guy playing video games? 3 weeks ago:
80s micros consistently look better than any modern computer OR modern keyboard. I'll fight you on this and I'll win.
- Comment on Confirmed - Electronic Arts (EA) sold off to investors including Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund 4 weeks ago:
Well, yeah, but those principles don't typically relate to videogame companies nor to purchase habits regarding 30 year old videogames.
Voting with your wallet is ultracapitalist, self-serving non-activism people deploy performatively to make themselves feel better about stuff they don't care that much about, not "principles". No offense.
- Comment on What are your must-block tags on social media? 4 weeks ago:
In social media? Not much.
Here I block any and all threads and communities that focus on US news. Specifically stuff that just has a generic name ("News") but is 100% US-focused content.
Night and day improvement, frankly.
- Comment on Confirmed - Electronic Arts (EA) sold off to investors including Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund 4 weeks ago:
"Principles"? Man, is that self-indulgent.
- Comment on Confirmed - Electronic Arts (EA) sold off to investors including Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund 4 weeks ago:
It's been EA since a different millenium. I think it's time to get over it.
FWIW, the remake itself was made by an external studio including members of the original team and they apparently collaborated closely with some sort of consulting group of modders and preservation-focused community people.
- Comment on Confirmed - Electronic Arts (EA) sold off to investors including Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund 4 weeks ago:
It's pretty good. Comes with both C&C and Red Alert, plus a bunch of extras. Definitely worth it.
- Comment on Confirmed - Electronic Arts (EA) sold off to investors including Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund 4 weeks ago:
I mean, they published Split Fiction and Tales of Kenzera this year and their Star Wars games were more than decent (let's hear it for the atrociously underrated X-Wing revival they made with Squadrons). They also published the C&C Remaster that same year, which I feel doesn't get enough credit despite getting a lot of credit. Probably one of the best examples of one of those in recent memory.
Let's not be disingenuous, none of that is their bread and butter, but it's not like they were entirely dormant.
- Comment on Brazil's president has signed a ban on selling loot boxes to minors as part of a larger online child safety law 4 weeks ago:
I don't think an outright ban would be acceptable at all or grounded in any kind of proportionality. It's one thing to use gambling as a guilt-by-association thing, but if gambling isn't outright illegal even in that somewhat fallacious interpretation an outright ban would be absurd.
Which is something I feel a lot of the people rallying against this practice often didn't think through, but hey.
I still disagree with your interpretation of that literature review.
This systematic literature review analyzes 190 empirical studies published between 2012 and 2023, revealing nuanced findings. Regarding compliance, 41% of studies reported high compliance levels, 29% low compliance, and 29% inconclusive results. For effectiveness in achieving regulatory goals, 44% found self-regulation effective, 33% ineffective, and 24% inconclusive.
Our review also finds that the presence of intermediaries such as industry associations, third-party auditors, and NGOs, along with certain types of state involvement, tends to enhance self-regulation outcomes.
That's less "it's a crapshoot" and more "it generally works, especially if there is an overisght body".
Which in this case there absolutely is, given that this all slots into pre-existing age ratings and content warnings. Your misgivings don't line up with the data you provide and don't line up with pre-existing analogous self-regulation.
I've seen nothing to suggest this is any more problematic than either other types of monetization or other types of content restriction, and the big differentiator between violent/sexual content and this seems to be whether the segment of the userbase that posts online likes it as a matter of creative opinion.
- Comment on Just in case you've been living under a rock: The Crew is playable again! 4 weeks ago:
No, for sure, it's a good thing. I just found the expression funny in the context. The Crew is what it is.
- Comment on Brazil's president has signed a ban on selling loot boxes to minors as part of a larger online child safety law 4 weeks ago:
OK, if you want to play it like that, let me start by challenging a couple of assumptions.
First, the relevance of linking loot boxes to problem gambling. Ultimately gambling is not illegal, so this doesn't inherently suggest that the situation demands new legislation. The worst case scenario here is loot boxes are made analogous to gambling, which is presumably already as regulated as it's going to get on each territory. There's a lot more to question there, as there was on all the frankly sloppy analysis on the links of gaming to violence in the 90s, but there is an implication at the core of the attempt to link them in the first place that I don't think is justified.
Second, I dispute the need for them being on the wane predating your gate for legislation. For one thing, you're not being explicit about when "regulation" by your definition starts. By the way you've sourced it you can arbitrarily choose any point in time. For another, it makes sense that regulation and self-regulation would happen in parallel. Ultimately bad PR and negative research motivates both public and private action. Again I refer to the 90s violent game panic. If the probes on gaming violence motivated the creation of age ratings agencies for gaming, does that mean the age ratings weren't enough of a mitigation and they should have deployed anti-violence legislation? I'm going to pretty strongly argue that's not the case.
Also, I feel you're misrepresenting the metastudy you provide on the results of self regulation. High compliance/high effectiveness is the biggest segment on all counts. Granted, on roughly half of the studies, but a lot more studies find self-regulation to work than not, by that metric. Why is "a small but replicable correlation" such a concern but a majority of studies finding self-regulation is highly effective a mixed result you don't trust? Seems to me you're not treating all the references you're using the same way.
FWIW, I find this conversation not particularly productive because, frankly, with these things the literature gets to be a huge mess. Again, my reference is the 90s violence campaigns, where so many terrible papers were being funded and published the academic conversation became entirely impractical. The fact is gaming did need some age ratings standard and it made sense for national agencies to exist to manage them. And it makes sense for those same agencies to have explicit policies not just on loot boxes, but on all in-game monetization. The industry needs best practices and safeguards. And the public, incidentally, needs a LOT more awareness of why self-declaring age in accounts is important and what safeguards are already in place as it is, because there is a ton of parental control and underage protection that kicks in but nobody is particularly aware of.
But instead gamers whose concern with loot boxes is primarily artistic have been rooting for overreach in hopes the result is games they like more. I find that risky and problematic, and the idea of Brazil's government passing wide-ranging age verfication regulation and having English-speaking media and social media report on it based on a mostly reasonable mandate of loot box games carrying an 18+ rating more concerning than any of the underlying issues being addressed.
- Comment on Just in case you've been living under a rock: The Crew is playable again! 4 weeks ago:
I mean, good for people getting this up and running, but "in case you've been living under a rock" may overrepresent how much the average person wants to play The Crew.